Transcription
Today's guest built a $120 million company at 21 years old. A student kicked out of Columbia University. He is Roy Lee.
Roy Lee.
Hello, my name is Roy Lee. I'm 22 years old and I run a $100 million AI startup with my best friends living in the heart of New York City. Here is the Roy Lee method to getting rich.
What is the Royale method? The Roy Lee method has a few requirements. It requires that you are young. By young, I mean like under the age of 28. It requires that you are sufficiently brain rotted, meaning that you actually spend probably more than two hours a day scrolling Tik Tok or Instagram res. It requires that you are have an IQ probably over 115. I don't think you have to be the most smartest genius in the world, but I do think that you can't be [ __ ] for this method. And I think that you need to have some [ __ ] balls and allow yourself to be okay with other people thinking that you're completely [ __ ]
So, those are the requirements to achieving the the Roy method of getting rich. And specifically uh the royally method involves making a lot of money very early on with software subscription based products. There's a lot of ways to get rich. You know to be rich is actually quite easy to live like you have all the freedom and all the luxuries and all the glory in the world. You really only need something like a few million dollars liquid and there's so many ways to get to a few mill. You know pick any career stick with it for 20 years and you'll probably be at a few mill unless you you decided to pick a like [ __ ] cashier at McDonald's. You know like like generally most management consultants will get there after a long arduous 5 years in their career.
The only thing is nobody wants to be rich when I'm 40. Like, when I'm 40, my life is over. Like, I don't want to be rich when I'm 40. I don't want to spend my 20s and 30s having no [ __ ] money. The Royal Method dictates that you make money quick because I don't want money when I'm old fat, bald, and [ __ ]
And if you actually think about it and you ignore all the noise online from these like like like fake super rich kids driving around in luxury rented cars, and you actually investigate how are people making money online, how are people making a few million dollars before the age of, you know, like 25, there's only only a few ways. And the Roy method very specifically is the way of getting rich with software subscriptionbased products. I say software products really specifically because the alternative is like a hardware or a physical product. And I always advise people, I've made videos on this before, hardware products are just not going to print you a [ __ ] ton of money. The margins are bad. It takes a lot of operating costs. It takes so much space. To actually make $5 million as a clothing brand owner, for example, you probably got to sell upwards of $100 million of clothes. That's really [ __ ] hard to make $5 million as a software owner, you know, like you've just kind of got to sell probably like $6 million of your software if if you do it right. That's comparably much much easier.
Now, requirement one of the Roy method is that you must be young under the age of 28. And I guess the the second requirement is that you must be sufficiently brain rotted. The reason why this is such an important requirement is because when you are young, you actually don't have that many advantages over older people. There's not many enterprises or sectors of business that you know a lot about, but you actually do have one gigantic advantage that is like the [ __ ] gold rush of the world right now. And that is the ability to understand what makes viral content.
Most of you don't think that you actually have this skill. Most of you walk around thinking that you know like I've never made content before. I'm not an influencer. Some people these people just must have brains for it. Actually in reality if you are relatively smart and you know what 100 115 plus IQ and you have spend you know like 2 hours a day scrolling Tik Tok and Instagram res your brain has actually processed you literally have the the algorithmic machine learning model in your head for what makes a viral video. You know when to scroll off a video. You know how to look at a video and say like yeah I never watch this [ __ ] I give me back my Reddit stories on top of subway surfers.
And one of the most surprising things that you'll learn if you really talk to a bunch of old people about content specifically is that they actually don't know. Most 35-year-olds, even the ones who work in marketing, will literally watch sit down and watch the most boring 45minute long documentary and think, "Wow, that was the most entertaining [ __ ] of my life." They don't understand the level of [ __ ] like like like attention grabbing whatever [ __ ] you need to actually make a video that is watchable in the modern day of scrolling um among among among the youth. But you have that skill. No matter what anybody says, if you're 115 plus IQ and like like you have to know that you're 115 plus IQ and you actually spend time scrolling, your brain has already processed it. You are young. you are you are this is the one thing that you can do and that's great because that is almost the only skill you need to know when you're trying to market a product because really when you're trying to make money selling software there's only two things you got to You got to build the software to sell and then you got to go out and [ __ ] sell the software. And selling the software is so so easy when you can make content. If you could just reliably, you could press a button that gets a million people to watch your thing, to view your product, and you just spam the [ __ ] out of that button. Even if you have the shittiest conversion, the shittiest, the shittiest website, the shittiest product, eventually someone's going to go and someone's going to buy your $60 a month subscription. You just keep spamming the button long enough, then you'll make a you'll make you'll make money cuz it remember it only takes a few million dollars. And the only determiner of whether you're able to make that money is if you are able to spam this button. is this button spamable for you? And I'm telling you right now, like the first most important thing you need to realize is as a 115 plus IQ person under the age of 28 who has over 2 hours of screen time on Instagram or Tik Tok, you have the ability. The button is right there. You just got to [ __ ] press it.
And another thing is I I hate when people say like, "Oh my god, so you're just never going to build anything useful for anybody in the world." Like, no. Cuz if you start with a payment link, you know, if you start with the payment link to something shitty and you keep saying the view button, you'll actually learn like here's what people are paying for when they do pay. You're going to be flooded with customer support requests. like people are going to people will be upset at you because your product is so [ __ ] and you're actually going to have to go go back and fix the bugs and then when you actually talk to any of these people they will tell you like here's the thing that here's the reason why I paid here's what I paid for and even in making the videos like you will learn some of your videos go way more viral than other pe than others like if you start talking about oh this this product is a Bible chat app that I built and it's just [ __ ] like chatbt clone and that video goes super viral then you will learn like oh [ __ ] like maybe this is maybe this is an interesting part of the market that I should start building more towards this Bible chat app okay now let me give a more proper case for software and I I'll use some my story here So, my first company that I actually ended up making uh quite a bit of money on was called Interview Coder, and it was uh probably my ninth software product at this point, but it was the only one that ended up making me a significant amount of money.
Here's what happens. I am a CS major. I don't know [ __ ] about any enterprises. I tried to make a bunch of companies before that are trying to target different sectors of the economy, like [ __ ] liquor distributors and like restaurants and like [ __ ] like researchers. I don't know [ __ ] about any of that. So, I can't make a good product in any of those fields. All I know is, you know, I'm a CS major. A bunch of my friends are trying to get internships and they have to do this weird technical interview called a leak code interview. So I take the only thing in the entire world that I know is [ __ ] leak code interviews and I build a tool that lets you ace your leak code interviews by cheating with an undetectable little little screen widget. It's a really shitty tool. It's essentially just chatbt that sees your screen. Extremely simple to build and I built it literally over the course of two weeks 100% with AI by the way and I launched it. You know like this was a shitty tool in the only space that I knew. But this ended up making me millions of dollars because I knew how to market it. I knew actually that after I built this extremely simple tool, the way to get a bunch of money is to get a bunch of people to download, to get a bunch of people to see that I built this interesting tool, this semi-in tool. And the way that I chose to do that was by recording myself using it on an Amazon interview, like an actual interview to be an intern at Amazon. I recorded myself using it, passing the interview, and then I uploaded online, and this went super mega viral in the world of technology. The biggest takeaway from my first company and for for me, for you, for anybody listening to the story should be that you can build something extremely simple. And if you can just spam the [ __ ] 1 million views per video button, then you can just [ __ ] print cuz it actually did make me millions of dollars in profit.
My next company was also largely based around this exact idea. You know, as soon as I launched interview coder, I decided, you know what? I have the [ __ ] button. Let me see what what else what else I can like like spam the button with. So, I built interview coder, but instead of lead code interviews, it was like for other random [ __ ] I said for everything, you know, like literally the product you use to cheat on everything. Like, I don't even know what the [ __ ] that meant, but I just figured, you know what? Like, there's a very small net that I'm casting here. I'm I'm I'm hitting the 1 mill view button and there's a million people every day who are viewing this product, but there's a very very tiny portion who have le code interviews for tech jobs. What would happen if I just said [ __ ] everything? Like, whatever. Like, like let's just let's just see if I can build this thing. Just say it's for everything, have like the shittiest product ever that I'm vibe code in three weeks, and let's just let's just put out into the world. And that's exactly what I did. And my first video got 11 million views or like 13 million views. And then every single video subsequent video I made kept getting millions and millions of views. And the whole time the product did not work. We did not have proper audio transcription. We didn't do anything that I said that that that we said it could do. And yet it was still dead ass printing me millions. If you have the button, the 1 million views button. Like most people really don't understand how [ __ ] OP the ability of content is in the world. In no universe ever would I have been able to put out the product that I did at the time of launch, which was really, really shitty, really broken, and been able to generate anywhere near the millions of dollars that I actually did make with that shitty broken product. It would have been impossible had I not had this button.
And it's really hard for the human brain to actually comprehend these big massive numbers. But social media has really truly democratized the world. You hear people say, "Wow, Instagram has made everyone think that everyone is supposed to be a supermodel and given everyone insecurities." And like genuinely, that is so much truer than you think. If you only see, you know, maybe like 100 to 200 influencers regularly in the entire world, like your brain has been programmed to think that there's only a few relevant people, the 150 influencers that that you follow and who whose content you watch, those are the only people that actually exist in your in in your mind. This is so vastly different from how the world was, you know, like 20 30 years ago or even like how the world was like two 20,000 years ago. When we were cavemen, we lived in tribes of like 150 people. And when someone told you something, when one of the 150 people in your universe told you something, you took that as fact. You had to you had to rep guard so viciously as a caveman because if five five members of the tribe decide to walk around saying like, "Yo, this guy's a weirdo." Then you're excluded and you're dying. You're starving. You're dying in the cold in the winter. So, it's extremely important to monitor the voices and the [ __ ] that people are saying of the 150 people that you actually determine to be in your tribe, you know, like like like your close village. And the human monkey brain is still wired this way. That's what the human brain is designed to do. We were not designed to live in these algorithm based worlds. But the benefit of that is that if you can actually manage to be that voice, that 150, that one out of 150 person who says, "Yo, like this this this new hairspray is kind of like great. Like this is some great W hairspray." You can manage to be that for not just 149 other people. With social media, you can manage to be that be that for millions of people. And I don't know how clearly I've made that point come across, but genuinely with the power of content, you can pretty much just be whispering in the ear of literally millions of people. And every single thing that I've done has been just a testament to the fact that content can make you millions of dollars. There's no product I've built so far that has been like massively technologically differentiated from anything else in the market. There's actually no product I built so far, you know? I I I I didn't build GPT6. I didn't build like [ __ ] anything ridiculously crazy. I built like very simple products and I just [ __ ] spam the [ __ ] out of these 1 million views. And you can too. Like once you know that you have the skill, the only thing left to do is to actually like try and try trying try try and click the button for the first time and make your first piece of content cuz you actually do know a lot better than other people like how to make content and try very hard to make your first subscription based software product. Like it's it's it really is that simple. And what you will also realize when you do two of these things like both of these things in conjunction is that there's literally no one in the world who's doing either of those things.
So, that's the first half of the Roy method. you know, build a software product and uh spam your 1 million views a video button. Ask yourself honestly, of all the people that you know in all your friends and family, how many people have done one of those two things? How many people do you know who have actually put up a 100 videos online, 100 short form videos? It takes what, like a minute to record a short form video and upload it online. How many people do you know that have taken 100 minutes to record themselves and put up a 100 videos online? You probably know if you are really surrounded by content, content creators, like you may you maybe know three. So, nobody's making content. And then ask yourself also how many people do you know that have actually like if you said yo did have you ever built some software that I can pay for how many people do you know in your entire circle of everybody that you know of all the friends of friends all the mutuals that you have that have actually done this before and the answer is going to be probably like [ __ ] like two and this is such a huge mindset shift you need to overcome cuz it's really really hard to understand that this is true when you are starting out I remember when I was at Columbia building bu building companies and I would hear this advice all the time I would hear you actually have no competition you just need to power through like most people are not going to make it through to the end but still I would overwhelmed just thinking like, dude, it's going to be so hard for me to actually build a company because my competition is actually like, you know, like maybe nobody in college is doing this [ __ ] but there's a bunch of 28-year-old indie hackers out there from [ __ ] Russia who are doing this and they're a lot smarter than me and they're a lot more experienced than me. What do I know that they don't know?
But like in reality, if you are, again, this is why the Roy method is very important that you are 115 plus IQ. If you are actually 115 plus IQ under the age of 28, then it's pretty much the same thing as your competition being a bunch of 14year-olds like a a bunch of freshman girls. But wow, that that's actually a great analogy. Imagine you are competing in the world of business with a bunch of 14-year-old freshman high school freshmen. How confident would you feel that like, yeah, I'm going to like literally demolish the [ __ ] out of these these high school freshmen and then I'm going to give them some life some life advice after I'm at it cuz they are so [ __ ] They don't know what the [ __ ] they're doing. That is the actual state of the world that you living in. This is such a truly hard mental thing to get over to actually realize and like convince yourself that you know what, these people are [ __ ] [ __ ] These people have the IQ of high school freshman females. Voids. to actually convince yourself of that is very hard. But when you do, then it makes it so much easier to do the only two things that you have to do, which is build a shitty software product that just get a purchase link out there. And once you have the purchase thing, spam the [ __ ] out of the view button. It just it really is that simple. The only reason that it's not being done by you, the only reason the Roy method isn't being deployed by every single sub 115 plus IQ sub 28-year-old in the [ __ ] world right now, it's cuz they can't do the first two things. Build something shitty. Give me give me a payment link and and [ __ ] make videos. Give me a payment link and make make videos.
So yeah, like truly the the second half of the Roy method is is do whatever it takes to to to build up some ego, you know, do whatever it takes to uh get yourself to a point where you can actually convince yourself that you are capable of doing these things cuz honestly like genuinely ask yourself if it was me verse Amy Tran, you versus Amy Tran, build a better company. Do you genuinely think that you're going to lose to Amy Tran? Okay, for if you think you're going to lose this high school freshman girl, then like [ __ ] log off, go see a therapist, do whatever it takes to like reset your factory settings and build up some ego as a [ __ ] man cuz that's embarrassing. You would not think that you would lose cuz why in the [ __ ] [ __ ] world would you lose to some girl who hasn't even developed her who hasn't even had a [ __ ] boyfriend yet? Why in the world would you lose to this person? It would be so ridiculous. You should be laughing at the thought of you losing. And that actually is not just how delusionally confident you need to be in the real world. You will learn when you actually do. It's not [ __ ] delusional confidence at all. That's the state of the world. These people that compete that you're competing with are [ __ ] [ __ ] They're all high school freshman girls mentally essentially. And it would just make you so much more confident, wouldn't it? Like if the competition is just make better content or actually content might be the one thing. This is why I'm saying it's important to be young. Content might be the one thing that you might be scared to compete with against a high school freshman girl. The task was literally anything, you know, like like build build a better house, design this page better. Like like you're you're always going to think like, "Yeah, I'm going to beat this. I'm going to beat this beat this." And once you have that ego, then it becomes so easy to do the two things that you have to do. Build some shitty thing, get a payment link out there, and spam the [ __ ] out of the view button.
There's so much feedback that you'll get from making content and seeing the views come in and seeing the conversions come in. And there's so much feedback that you will get from people actually like paying for your really shitty product that it is inevitable that it's going to improve in some way in some metric. One day you'll wake up and realize like, oh, this is not so ass. And if all you want in life is to get rich quick and you don't need to be a billionaire, you just want to, you know, have the term like richness, then you only need a few mil. And that's actually so [ __ ] easy. It's so [ __ ] easy to make 3 mil in a world where nobody's building anything. Nobody has any purchase links out and the only people who have purchase links out don't know how to [ __ ] make a real. It's so easy to win. genuinely always remind yourself you are competing against a bunch of freshman high school freshmen. So go out there dominate uh maybe that's not the right word. Go beat go win the competition against these high school freshman girls cuz it really is the case. Get a payment link out if you can't get a payment link out within one week of watching this video. You're never going to make it and you're doomed in your second life to be reincarnated in the worst dirty slums of of India because you don't have what it takes. Spiritually, you are a lazy piece of [ __ ] who is never going to make it in life because you never had it in you to begin with. You neither have the ego, the default factory setting ego of a man, nor do you have the conviction and hard work and diligence to get anything done ever. Nor do you have the balls to actually accomplish anything that you will ever want in your life. So, be prepared to be a [ __ ] snail in Bangladesh in your next life or get a payment link out and start making content and get rich. That, my friends, is the Roy method. I will see you all next week.